Many businesses within our industries aim to attract new prospects and leads, and optimising your marketing to generate leads is a great way to do this. However, generating new leads via your website can be difficult, sometimes costing hundreds of dollars per lead. Once overheads and closing rates are accounted for, the cost per sale can skyrocket.
You may already be using social media to drive leads, and it may be working for you. But what if we told you we could supercharge your lead campaigns? It’s as easy as running on-platform lead ads.
Understanding the Difference
Before diving into the benefits, let’s clarify what we mean by on-platform versus on-site leads.
On-site leads are what most businesses are familiar with. A user clicks your Facebook ad, gets directed to your website, navigates to a contact form or landing page, fills out the form, and hopefully converts. This process involves multiple steps and potential exit points throughout the journey.
On-platform leads keep the entire process within Facebook. Users see your ad, click a “Learn More” or similar button, and a lead form pops up directly within Facebook without leaving the platform. They fill out the form and submit, all without ever visiting your website.
The difference might seem small, but the impact on conversion rates and cost per lead can be significant.
Benefits of On-Platform Leads
If you aren’t already using on-platform lead forms, there are many reasons to look at introducing these as part of your strategy.
Seamless user experience: On-platform leads cut out any navigation that happens onsite, keeping users within Facebook where they’re already engaged. This removes friction points and dramatically improves conversion rates.
Stronger CPLs (Cost Per Lead): Eliminating the steps between ad click and form submission will typically lower the cost per lead compared to driving traffic to your website first.
Mobile optimised: Facebook lead forms work on all devices, but they are optimised for mobile devices. This makes sense as 95% of impressions and traffic on social are from mobile.
Easy testing and customisation: You can test form variations and customisations across your ads strategy without making changes to your website.
No dev resources needed: Unlike an on-site lead form which needs to be created and published in the back-end, on-platform leads are easy and require no technical support to create.
Get Started with a CRM Integration
You may have run lead ads in the past, but found it a manual process. You downloaded leads daily, only to find that by the time you reached out to your new leads, they had already purchased elsewhere. Over the last few years, Facebook has made it easier with advancements to its CRM integration.
Now, more CRM partners are integrated with the platform. This means you can set your lead ads to feed new prospects directly into your CRM, in real-time, for your sales team to follow up with and convert. Facebook is now compatible with over 600 CRM platforms, each with instructions on how to connect your CRM.
Don't Use a Compatible CRM?
If you don’t use a compatible CRM, fear not! You can manage your organic and paid leads pipeline through Leads Centre. Leads Centre allows you to manage your leads by identifying which ones were qualified or converted. This can give you insight into where your leads are coming from (paid or organic), how long the customer journey takes, and how qualified the lead is (conversion rate).
Leads Centre also has a fully customizable interface. For a dealer, where it could take months for a prospect to turn into a sale, this can be useful to bucket audiences that may need more nurturing from your sales team.
You can access the Leads Centre via Meta Business Suite.*
*Certain page and account permissions required
Filter Out the Rubbish
One criticism we often hear about Facebook lead forms is that they are low quality. That can be true, but you can set your lead forms up to produce quality leads based on your business goals. To generate quality leads, Facebook has a few features that can be enabled.
Enable the high-quality lead feature
It sounds counterproductive, but the way to generate stronger-quality leads is to make the lead process more difficult. Facebook enables this through the high-quality feature. It means audiences are stopped before blindly submitting their information to review their data. It’s a small step, but it deters people who aren’t genuinely interested and are just submitting a lead for the hell of it.
Add questions
Statistically speaking, the more questions you put in a lead form, the lower the conversion rate. But in this instance, adding more questions can also help filter out audiences who aren’t quite qualified to be leads for your business. Get people to think about their answers before blindly completing your lead forms. Questions that OEMs and dealers can ask include:
Do you have a trade-in?
Do you need finance?
What kind of model are you looking at (family, hybrid, off-road, touring, etc.)?
Get Tactical
Want even more leads for your business? On-platform lead forms can incentivise customers in exchange for their data. Offering something in return is a great way to increase conversion rates and lower your CPL. Let’s explore some ways this can be done with Facebook.
Downloadable content
Facebook lead forms now allow advertisers to attach a PDF behind their lead forms. This allows audiences to download content once the user has submitted their lead form. This is a great way to generate brochure downloads while capturing user data for the sales team to follow up. It also feeds that need for instant gratification, as the user doesn’t have to go check their inbox to see if they have received a brochure.
Offers
Launched in late 2024, Facebook Lead Forms now allow brands to include offers to audiences who submit a lead form. This could be a monetary incentive, such as a 10% off code, or a free or upgraded service. Facebook lead forms are about the value exchange, so offering something in return for customer data will always yield results.
Conditional formatting
Further customise lead forms through conditional formatting. This is where the form is formatted to ask a subsequent question based on the answer to the previous question. This adds customisation at scale to each person’s user journey and makes the form more dynamic on the platform, and more valuable for a business. The answers provided via conditional formatting could make the difference in your sales team closing a deal.
Making the Switch That Converts
On-platform lead forms can fundamentally change your lead generation economics. The combination of higher conversion rates, lower costs per lead, and better mobile optimisation makes them particularly effective for businesses in our industries, where purchase consideration periods are longer.
The key is setting them up strategically. Use quality filters to ensure you’re not just generating more leads, but better leads, and integrate with your CRM to eliminate the manual handoffs that kill conversion rates. And don’t be afraid to get tactical with incentives and conditional formatting to maximise both the quantity and quality of your leads.
At Retain Media, we help businesses transition from expensive website lead generation to high-converting on-platform strategies. If you’re ready to supercharge your lead campaigns and reduce your cost per acquisition, contact us to talk about how on-platform leads can transform your results.
